Perfect
by Is0lde
Summary: Jack tries to adapt.


**Author's note**: The word "_perfect_" is used 14 times in this piece of crap… err, I mean fanfiction, and it's not a coincidence. Just so you know. Also, I haven't had the time to really read it through, so any mistakes or repeated words (except for "_perfect_") I blame on lack of time.  
Please comment, that'd make my day **perfect**. Thank you.  
**Disclaimer**: For all you nimrods out there who haven't actually looked up the source of the blockbuster movie, newsflash: everything significant belongs to Chuck "God" Palahniuk. Mister and missus Perfect belong to me, though I'm not really proud or happy about it.

* * *

**Perfect**

I gawk in bewilderment at the shampoo bottle with the picture of the Little Mermaid on the cover, standing on the edge of the bathtub, which has inevitably become an altar to capitalism. When used, capitalism and imperialism and materialism are revered. I shudder to think what might be in the bathroom mirror-door cabinet.

Everything is sparkly and new. Everything glows and shines effulgent, and I half expect the tap to be a disgusting snotty nuance of gold. Overcome by curiosity, I check, my eyes mere slits, trying to keep them closed so as to avoid enhancing the sickening feeling in my stomach.

It isn't. But it might as well have been.

The ceramic glazed tiles covering the floor and walls, you can actually see your reflection in them. Not a flaw as far as the eye can see.

This is the newly done bathroom of my newest social contact, Larsen. I know him from work. The details about Larsen are, he's in his early thirties, too good looking to be one hundred percent natural. He has a gorgeous wife he met at some-or-other gourmet cooking class, a dog he picked up from an animal shelter, and a baby, about five or six months old and all soft and squishy and deliciously repulsive. He's also fucking his secretary, whose name ironically enough rhymes with "harlot", but of course his wife doesn't know that, because he's extra careful when it comes to keeping his marriage together. Also, when he's off secretly humping this secretary, _she's_ secretly using up all the contents of the mini-bar, and not because she has a fucking clue, but because she's a bored, lonely house-wife with too much free time on her hands. I know this because he's told me, in one of those earnest man-to-man talks. Him sobbing all over me, making me think of support-groups, making me think of Big Bob, making me think of testicular cancer, and do I really need to go on?

Of course the prospect of being faithful has never occurred to him.

Larsen always wears the same suit to work, either that or he has fifty copies of the exact same suit. I'm going for the latter. He's a "why-change-a-winning-concept-when-it's-comfortable" person. He's also the type of person I would have had to restrain myself not to kill "back in the days".

But I've learned to adapt.  
But I've learned to reject my former ways and accommodate to the society I first loved and then hated with a fiery passion.  
But I've tried so hard to forget all about Tyler and his influence over me that I've begun to think him nothing more than – that's right – a fucking illusion my mind set up just so I didn't have to take responsibility for my actions.

We're having dinner. Me – and that's a singular me – and Marla Singer the fucking tourist, who's sort of just hung along for the ride since I got rid of Tyler, are having dinner at Larsen's place, and his gorgeous wife will be attending, and I've promised myself not to spend the entire dinner staring at her cleavage. And right now, I'm using their bathroom, and all I can think of is, this is so fake. This entire room, it's such a cover-up. The man's marriage is hanging by a thread – secretly – and instead of spending money on a marriage counselor, he uses up his entire month salary on decorating their mutual bathroom.

Oh, of course it's not _just_ the bathroom. It's the living room. It's the kitchen. It's the bedroom. But only the bathroom has towels branded "Martha Stewart collection".

I'm using their bathroom, and I'm thinking, this is their perfectly crafted facade. Sure, everything seems oh-so-wonderful from the outside. Love at first sight, bah-dah-bing bah-dah-boom, marriage and a kid and a dog, the excellently decorated house, the little delicate flowers in hand-made pots, a house in the better part of town where they don't have to worry about their kid being molested by the next-door neighbor… they think. Well, beneath that, there's the anxiety, there's that feeling that whatever or whoever you do, it's still impossible to reach perfection.

By the way, perfection, it's a modern myth. Nobody's perfect, but everyone pretends they are, in order to keep up with the rest of the world who are also pretending to be perfect, and thus the evil circle goes on and on and on and on and no one has the clarity of mind to evade it.

Anyway, we're having dinner with mister and missus Perfect. They meet us at the door, their sparkling white teeth bared in strained false smiles, and his wife at his side, Larsen grabs my hand and shakes it heartily.

"Great to see you, man! Glad you could make it. The trip was all right? Oh, how delightful, I see you've brought a dinner-date?" He grabs Marla's nicotine-yellow hand.

Her smile is vague but distinctly hostile. I really shouldn't have brought her along, hell, I didn't want to, but she practically hi-jacked the fucking car. "Lovely, charming, absolutely wonderful. And you are…?"

"She's just a friend." Cold sweat down my neck. I'm so not handling this as well as I hoped I would. Come on, be normal, for Christ's sake, calm down and act like a fucking person. "This is miss Singer, Marla, say hello to Larsen."

"It's Thomas." The pearly whites flashing again, you'd almost think it was a means for hypnotizing people. That would explain why the same sort of commercials sells products, if that sort of unnatural whiteness had a brainwashing quality, and oh my God, will I ever be able to stop?

Marla nods and enters the house uninvited. Why wait for niceties when you already know they're going to invite you? Hell, I don't even raise an eyebrow. It's just so typical.

Larsen's gorgeous wife with her enormous fake tits is staring at Marla as though she was some sort of exotic animal never before displayed to the public, but the false smile doesn't wear off. Not until the honorable guest kicks off her shoes and they land on the beautiful, imported and probably extremely expensive Chinese rug in the hallway.

"We have a shoe-shelf right here," she exhales politely, her eyes gouging out of her sockets, her perfect wrinkle-free skin strained to the limit where I'm starting to actually hope for it to burst.

Marla, who has about one minute earlier put out her cigarette on the costly bonsai tree out on the front porch, just turns her head and looks at her for a moment, then nods and keeps on walking bare-footed into the kitchen ahead. "Good for you," she throws back over her shoulder, then turns around the bend and disappears out of sight.

I don't know whether to thank whoever's up there bossing over our lives that she decided to invite herself along, seeing as this will definitely make this little dinner-party oh so much more interesting, or curse that very same deity for destroying my chances at a normal, healthy, social relationship.

"So what do you do?" asks the man who wants Marla to call him Thomas, but who has never ever uttered his first name to _me_ even though we've been working together for months. "What line of business are you in?" he adds, staring discourteously and quite openly at her barely covered chest. Today is laundry-day and all Marla had left to dress in was a smutty old rag with a décolletage that would have made Marilyn blush.

His wife has her nose too far down into her wineglass to notice.

She stares at him for a second, holding her glass in her hand halfway to her mouth, her expression blank. Then, she takes savors the rest of the wine contained in the glass, reaches for the half-empty bottle and answers him, "Sales, I'm in sales."

Selling other people's clothes meanwhile leeching off another person, in this case me, doesn't really constitute as a profession, but she could care less.

"Sales, huh? Interesting."

Interesting my ass. His eyes are fixed a great distance below her chin, and I'm sure she's noticed by now, but she's doesn't seem to mind. After all, it's just a sign of appreciation. Marla's never been a rigid feminist. Men look at her like a piece of meat? Fine, as long as they know she's not for sale.

Everything's so quiet, I can actually hear the refrigerator buzzing silently, the electricity flowing in the air, emitting from the television – plasma screen – the computer in mister Larsen's study and the microwave.

This is the mingled sound of nothing at all to say. The noise of uncomfortable silence. It's deafening.

This sort of fills me with the urge to do something unexpected. Dance on the table, throw a dish to the floor, step on the shards, _feel_ something.  
Pick a feeling, any feeling's good. A little pain would be great right about now. In this sterile desert of flawlessness, this landscape of excellence, hit me with a sledgehammer and I'll be satisfied.

"May I use your bathroom?"

How's that for unexpected.

Everyone's in the middle of the main course, a simply marvelous fillet mignon with mint sauce, and they look up from their plates, relieved at the sound of my voice.

"Of course," Larsen's voice echoes. "It's upstairs. Second door to the right."

I should have guessed. It's _always_ the second door to the right. It's like it's inevitable, one of the basic laws of nature. Grand house – bathroom behind the second door to the right. I nod courteously and stand up, removing the linen cloth napkin from my knee, receiving an odd look from Marla. It's like she's trying to send me a telepathic message: _Don't leave me here with these people. They're not right in the head. They're a fucking mess, this entire situation is creeping me out big time, let's get out before they serve the ice-cream with perfect and delicious cranberry sauce._

Too bad I'm not telepathic.

I grin at her and make my leave. My steps echo. I sound like a giant walking in enormous, empty halls of stone.

When I've reached the top of the stairs, I'm _so_ Jack's total relief. The pressure of eating at a table where the china is bought at an antique auction-house for 50 grand, which the noble hosts were only too eager to inform me before we began eating, it's mind-blowing. Marla doesn't give a shit, of course. Then again, Marla won't have to face Larsen at work every day for months and months and months to come at the office. Marla hasn't worked like a bitch to make her life work, trying so hard to readjust. She's unattached and perfectly fine with it. Me, I'm wondering, if Tyler's way of life isn't my way of life anymore, then what _is_ my way of life? Marla has no such thoughts in her little fucking head.

The doorknob is polished and burnished. I leave little fingerprints on it and think, whatever will missus Perfect do when she notices the guests has degraded her home? No, this is too much, I can't even go to the bathroom without fucking with my own head? Jeez.

So I'm in the bathroom, this dome of incomparability, feeling clumsy and dirty and _wrong_. Is this the sort of thing I'm going to have to adjust to? Is this what I'm up against?

Is this what defines a human being?

I half expect there to be an Ikea catalogue on the floor beside the toilet. There isn't. I guess they keep it somewhere else, but I bet if I gave the newest edition a good hard look, I'd find this exact bathroom depicted in it.

I don't use the toilet. I don't touch anything. I don't want to sully their perfection with my humanity, with all my flaws and indiscretions. I just stand there in the middle of the room, staring at everything, taking it in, thinking, when I get out of this house I'm never ever coming back again.

Sure, I wanted to adapt.  
Sure, I wanted to fit in again, at least so I wouldn't stick out like a sore thumb, at least so people, ordinary people like the Larsen's downstairs, wouldn't recognize the fact that I've been the leader of a terrorist organization out to minimize and corrupt and change the society. Equalize. Back to basic, kudzu-vines wrapping the Sears tower and all that shit.

Yeah, ignorance is bliss, and somehow I thought I could go back to the way things were before, because that was a hell of a lot easier than facing this fucked up way of life every single day, living it, and be disgusted at myself and everything around me.

But this just isn't worth it. Ignorance, it's unreachable to me now, like fucking Nirvana. I can't go back, I could never go back and pretend Tyler didn't happen. I was kidding myself. And now I'm here in the middle of everything with Marla at my side more or less willingly, thinking that if this is what I have to adjust to just to be _normal_, I'd much rather kill myself.

As I jump off the last step down on the one hundred percent dust-free floor, I feel like I've had a revelation.

"Thomas, I'm really, really sorry for this, but we have to get going. I just remembered I have an appointment at the doctor's today."

Larsen stares at me with his pig-like face all askew in disappointment. Not because _I'm_ going, but because Marla is. "Are you sure?"

"Absolutely. Marla, come on, let's go."

Marla gets up quicker than the wind, and with her wineglass still in her hand, she turns her back on the hosts and says, "Yeah, let's."

In the hallway, mister and missus Perfect are standing in the same position as they were when we arrived, almost as though they've been practicing it. Larsen shakes my hand and his wife looks handsomely submissive at his side.

"Too bad you couldn't stay for dessert," he says, smiling and looking at Marla in an unpleasant sort of way. She ignores him as she's slipping into her high-heel pumps.

"Yeah," I say, "too bad."

"Another time, perhaps?"

Another time. Another visit filled with anxiety and another reminder that I'm scarred for life, and not just physically. I don't think so.

"Yeah, another time," I say, my face contorted in the most vilely pleasant smile I can produce without straining a muscle. "Come on, honey." I grab Marla by the arm and she looks at me like I've just told her Italy actually _is_ a giant shoe. Choking on her wine, she shoves the now empty glass into the hands of Larsen's wife. She doesn't even flinch. Already she's become accustomed to the grand in-your-face-all-the-time demonstration of lack of etiquette that is Marla Singer.

I glare back at her. _No, you know perfectly well that wasn't an earnest expression of endearment. I just ensured us a quick getaway. I had to do something, or Larsen might've gotten possessive._

Apparently, she's not a psychic either. She shrugs almost undiscernibly and starts strutting down off the porch and over the perfectly trimmed lawn to the street, where she makes a left, opens the car-door and gets in nimbly.

As the happy couple close the door behind me, I can't help thinking, maybe I'm everything I can be and I should stop trying to be something I'm not.


End file.
